Automatically detecting AI text in my browser
Read it on seangoedecke.com Automated AI text detection is currently an underserved niche. The only game in town is Pangram, which does an excellent job but...
Radical responsibility means treating people like tools
Read it on seangoedecke.com A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking...
How to protect yourself from workslop
Read it on seangoedecke.com “Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text. The core problem...
You have to beat the models at something
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their...
Selling out
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true...
You should never be angry at work
Read it on seangoedecke.com I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every...
Readers can't identify watermarked AI text
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it...
Good writing is obvious, not original
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re...
Help peer
Read it on seangoedecke.com One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many...
AI text watermarking is not a big deal
Read it on seangoedecke.com People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude...
No, local models will not win
Read it on seangoedecke.com Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars...
Advanced AI sycophancy
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a...
I got an email about resistance
Read it on seangoedecke.com This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one...
How to keep thinking
Read it on seangoedecke.com Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over...
Giving and taking credit in big tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to...
AI models need moral support to make discoveries
Read it on seangoedecke.com One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a...
You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of...
LLMs reward expertise
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope...
AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models
Read it on seangoedecke.com Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this....
Impro is a handbook for running a cult
Read it on seangoedecke.com Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed...
